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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I recently had a nice conversation with Brian Dubin, VP at CERTIFY, where we discussed biometrics in healthcare. Brian got me interested when he described CERTIFY as a biometrics based “big data” company. When I first started this blog, I fell completely in love with all the various biometric options. Check out one of my first posts on Facial Recognition back in April 2006. Shortly after that I even made this EMR and biometrics contribution to a healthcare IT wiki as part of a “blogposium”. [Excuse my moment of nostalgia]

While CERTIFY works with all of the major biometric fingerprints: Finger, Palm, Iris, Facial, Voice, and Signature, I was even more intrigued by a discussion we had around a healthcare system that was biometrically controlled (my word not CERTIFY’s). I realize that the word “controlled” might have negative connotations surrounding it, but I think it is fascinating to consider all of the ways that your biometric identity could be incorporated into healthcare.

Here are some examples I’m considering (some are a reality today and others will be in the future):Arrive at the office – Imagine that when you arrive at the hospital or medical practice and a video camera grabs your image and the front desk already knows who you are and can say, “Hi John, glad to have you hear today.” Yes, this freaks out some people, but many of the front desk people remember the faces of the patients. Now they can know your name and check you in much quicker.

Positive patient identification – If you don’t like the video camera identification of a patient, you can also do positive identification of the patient using biometrics in a less big brother’s watching you way. When they sit down at the desk to check in, the patient can use a biometric device to identify themselves. Technology like the one I talk about in my post Retina Scanning vs. Iris Recongition are what can be used for this approach.

Voice recognition for a call center – Imagine when you call into a call center they used voice recognition to identify you. This could be used to access your information more quickly. Although, it could also be used to make sure that whoever the person in the call center pulled up matches the voice on the phone. This could solve them pulling up the wrong “John Smith.”

Single sign on – If your biometric identity is stored in the cloud, then that should make that identity available on any system. Plus, I’ve always been fond of single sign on with Facial recognition. The camera is always watching if you’re there or not and so if you open a new application it can immediately authenticate you since it’s constantly authenticating your biometric identity.

I’m really intrigued by the idea of using biometric identities across multiple systems. I’ve heard many hospital CIOs talk about the hundreds of IT systems they have to support. I’ve also heard doctors and nurses complain about the number of logins and passwords they have to remember. Could biometrics be the solution to this problem? Could a biometric identity be shared between systems or would each system need to do more of the traditional single sign on integration?

Unattended computer – Related to the single sign on, facial recognition can also identify when you’re no longer at a computer. If you leave the computer it can automatically lock the computer to ensure that the health data is kept private. You have to balance how quickly the device locks, but this can be great for security.

Location access – A lot of places already do this with fingerprint or palm scans to access private areas. Plus, this prevents the sharing of keys. You can’t really share your fingerprint very well.

Signatures – There’s certainly an art and identity in someone’s signature. However, why don’t we incorporate even more biometrics into someone’s signature? The combination of a signature plus some other biometric identity would be even more powerful. Plus, when I sign to pick up a prescription, if the pharmacy knew my fingerprint, they could indeed verify that I was the right patient.

HIE identification – I don’t know anyone that’s doing this, but I wonder if instead of trying to make a unique patient identifier, using social security numbers, or some other convoluted method of identity management, could we just use someone’s biometric identity? If we aren’t there today, I think we’ll get there eventually. I’m sure there could be mismatches when it comes to matching two biometric identities that were captured by two separate systems. However, we have plenty of mismatches using ssn, name, birthdate, etc. Maybe the real answer is a combination of biometrics and name, birthdate, etc.

A Biometric Healthcare Experience
Those are some general examples. Now let’s imagine a patient visit where they walk into the hospital and are immediately recognized as a patient seeing Dr. Jones for a surgery. The front desk knows who you and has you sign any forms using your biometrics and then directs you to room 315. When you arrive at room 315 you gain access to the room using your biometric identity. The nurse arrives to prep you for surgery and knows she’s working on the right patient because of your biometric identity.

The nurse signs into the EMR using facial recognition and that biometric identity is captured so the EMR knows exactly who is entering the data into the system. The lab arrives and attached your biometric identity to the blood draws and the results will automatically be sent to the EHR matching on your biometrics.

Your doctor writes a prescription for you which gets sent to the pharmacy. The pharmacy knows that he is indeed a doctor based on the biometric identity of the doctor. Once you go to pickup the prescription they verify your biometric identity to ensure you’re in fact the right patient for that prescription. You later go to your family doctor who’s received all of the information and reports from your surgery which were easily matched to you thanks to your biometric identity.

I could keep going, but I think you get the idea. I’m sure there are major holes in the above example, but I think it’s interesting to consider what a biometrically controlled healthcare experience would look like. Plus, to take a line from Google’s Founder, maybe I’m still thinking too small. It’s possible that biometrics will be able to do so much more. It’s not going to happen tomorrow or all at once, but I’m certain that biometrics will play a big part in the future of healthcare.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Are we on the path to a biometric controlled healthcare system?

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

While at AHIMA, I was lucky enough to meet John Trader from RightPatient (A part of M2SYS Healthcare Solutions). During our meeting he showed me the coolest technology I’ve seen in quite a while. Ever since I first started this blog, I had a serious interest in seeing how biometric solutions could benefit an EHR implementation. I’ve tried fingerprint, facial (and this review), voice, typing, etc and been amazed by the technology. Facial recognition was probably my favorite despite its weaknesses.

The funny thing is that I always shot down anyone that suggested the use of some sort of eye related biometric identification. Thinking to my only reference for retina scanning biometrics (movies like Mission Impossible), I didn’t see how that was going to integrate well with healthcare.

Turns out that I was wrong, and my big mistake was that I was looking at the technology from a doctor, nurse, front desk staff identification perspective as opposed to a patient identification perspective. Plus, I didn’t get the difference between retina scanning and iris recognition.

With this background, you can imagine my surprise when I fell in love with the RightPatient iris recognition technology that John Trader demoed to me at AHIMA. I shot this short video embedded below where John discusses the differences between retina scanning (the laser scan you see in the movies) and iris recognition. Then, John demos their iris recognition technology.

Much more could be said about how the iris technology works, but I think it’s best deployed at a hospital front desk during registration. Imagine the number of duplicates that could be avoided with good biometric iris recognition. Imagine the insurance abuse that could be avoided with iris recognition.

In the video I only showed one of the model’s that RightPatient deploys. They have another model that automatically swivels until it locates your iris. It’s hard to explain on the blog, but when you try it first hand it’s like magic.

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